Seeds of Pine

A handful of pine-seeds will cover mountains with the green majesty of the forest, and I, too, will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high. — Fiona Macleod

'What went ye out into the wilderness to see?' They answered thus, 'So that we might not see the city.' —SIR WILLIAM BUTLER.
The new steel trail the railway men are laying from Edmonton leads away and away, I cannot say whither. For these many days I have had an anxious desire to follow it and the glories thereof. I am tired of this town and of the electrical devices that appear and re-appear in the darkness like eyes that open and shut—wicked eyes that burn their commercial message into my very soul. I am sick of these saucy, swaggering streets and of sundry of the townspeople. Come you with me and let us travel down the ways through the heart of the summer! We shall have breeze and sun in our eyes, and breeze and sun in our hearts. If you like not the prospect, pray, come no further, for we be contrary the one to the other and no way-fellows.
As we climb on the train this morning, it seems as though our quest for quiet is to be cheated by the wallowing wave of humanity that threatens to submerge us. Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?
She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search of prospects ; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage bags—young fellows all in the full force of life—these, and the gang, who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging—that is going—for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the city meet the gang coming out. And so in everything they are retroactive, and fight much, and swear, to give weight to their differences of opinion. In one thing only is the gang agreed, no navvy has yet been found who disputed the axiom that the Boss is a yellow canine.